Dr. Marc Miskin
Assistant Professor
Electrical and Systems Engineering
University of Pennsylvania
“Tiny Robots”
09.13.23 | 4:10PM | 134 Featheringill Hall
Nature routinely makes smart, complex, microscopically tiny machines. But how can humans do it? And can we do it in a way that is easy to design and understand? This talk is about building microscopic robots, those too small to see with the naked eye. By co-opting semiconductor technology, I’ll show how to build fully autonomous, programmable micro-robots, complete with memory, microprocessors, communication systems, sensors, actuators, and on-board power. I’ll show several types of these tiny robots including quadrupeds, hexapods and some that use a solid-state electrokinetic propulsion mechanism to swim. Finally, I’ll discuss early work on applications, including a project to regrow damaged nerves literally pulling them where they need to go with tiny robots.
Bio. Marc Miskin is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He received a BSc. in Physics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and PhD. in Physics from the University of Chicago. Prior to joining the faculty at U. Penn, he was a Kavli Postdoctoral Fellow for Nanoscale Science at Cornell University. Currently, he is interested in the design and fabrication of microscopic robots. His work has won awards from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Army Research Office, a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Packard fellowship and been featured in several media outlets, including the New York Times, the MIT Tech Review’s 35 under 35 list, the BBC, and NPR.
Host: Xiaoguang Dong